CardMunch (for iPhone)

Human transcribers turn uploaded business card images into contacts, including full profile for LinkedIn members. Can invite to connect on LinkedIn, send email, copy to iPhone, forward contact info. Free.

Cons
Limited to iOS devices. User must be a LinkedIn member. Time to complete transcription varies. No way to bulk-transfer contacts to PC.

Bottom Line

For LinkedIn members, CardMunch connects with a transcription team to accurately transform business cards into contacts on your iPhone. Contact info includes full LinkedIn profile data, when available. It's a much better solution than any OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tool I've seen.

When I handed my business card to a vendor representative at the recent RSA conference, he snapped a photo with his iPhone and handed it back. Intrigued, I asked for an explanation. By using the CardMunch (free, direct) iPhone app he captured my full contact information, no typing required.

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Having experienced dozens of business card OCR (Optical Character Recognition) utilities over the years I was skeptical. However, it turns out that CardMunch doesn't use OCR at all. Rather, it transmits the card image to a team of human transcribers at LinkedIn. The time between submitting a card and getting detailed contact information varies, but what you do get is letter-perfect, unlike most OCR solutions. I'm a convert!

LinkedIn ConnectionYou do need a LinkedIn account in order to use CardMunch, but LinkedIn membership is free. As soon as you've installed the app it's ready to go. Point it at a business card, line up and focus the image, and snap a photo. If it's legible, upload it; if not, retake it. I uploaded all the cards from a recent conference in a matter of minutes. After that it's a waiting game, since actual humans at LinkedIn handle the transcription. I've gotten results within an hour, and certainly never had to wait more than overnight.

According to my CardMunch contact, every card goes through at least three human transcriptions, to ensure accuracy. Don't look for a basement filled with transcribers, though. CardMunch uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform, enlisting a global workforce to do the job.

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Exactly what you'll see for a given contact depends on the person's LinkedIn status. For non-members, you get exactly what's on the business card, with a Connect button that sends a LinkedIn invitation. For LinkedIn members you get the full LinkedIn profile and a small indicator of how closely you're connected. Naturally for your existing contacts the Connect button doesn't appear.

To search for a contact you just start typing. With each letter, the list narrows to include only those whose first name, last name, or company name start with the letters you've typed. You can also turn the phone on its side for a flip-through carousel view of all the cards you've snapped.

Other ActionsTapping the envelope icon on the contact page creates an email message pre-filled with boilerplate text that includes your LinkedIn profile page URL. Of course you can change the message text to say whatever you wish before sending.

A menu of action choices lets you forward contact info to another email account, save information to the iPhone's built-in contacts list, delete the entry, or resubmit the card for transcription. The recipient of a forwarded contact gets both an image of the card and a .VCF file with the data.

You can set a few global options by going into CardMunch's iPhone settings. Probably the most significant is "Auto Save to iPhone." With this option turned on every contact gets saved both within CardMunch and in the phone's own contact list.

You can also put the contact list in Edit mode. In this mode each contact gets a checkbox, and you can delete all checked contacts, send them all a LinkedIn invitation, or save them all to your iPhone's contacts.

Alas, there's no easy way to do a bulk transfer of contact information from the iPhone to your PC. The app's makers may have assumed that transfer will happen automatically when you sync contacts, but some of us don't burden the iPhone with our full collection of business contacts.

A Practical SolutionI used to come back from conferences and trade shows with stacks of business cards. I'd slip a rubber band around the stack and toss it in a drawer, with the other bundles. Finding a contact involved rummaging through any number of business card bundles. Now with CardMunch I don't need to hang onto cards.

Yes, there are some limitations. You have to be a LinkedIn member, it only works on iOS devices, and there's no easy way to do a bulk transfer of contacts to your PC. It's still the best solution I've seen for turning business cards into accurate, actionable contacts.

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